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Beloved Hungary, whose sons, disdaining the universe, used proudly to boast: "Have we not all that man needs? Banat, which gives us wheat; Tisza, wine; the mountain, gold and salt. Our country is sufficient for her children!" And this country, this fruitful country, was now covered with gibbets and corpses.
As a result of the decision of the Peace Conference which awarded Transylvania to Rumania and divided the Banat between Rumania and Jugoslavia, Hungary finds herself stripped of virtually all her forests, all her mines, all her oil wells, and all of her manufactories save those in Budapest, thus stripping the bankrupt and demoralized nation of practically all of her resources save her wheat-fields.
He was sound asleep! "Yet a little group of men," the King continued, "who know no more about the nations whose destinies they are deciding than Lloyd George knew about the Banat, have abrogated to themselves the right to cut up and apportion territories as casually as though they were dividing apple-tarts."
The soi-disant Austrian hussars subsequently attempted to raise the country, but, failing in this, were nearly all taken and executed. The Banat of Matchva. Losnitza. Feuds on the Frontier. Enter the Back-woods. Convent of Tronosha. Greek Festival. Congregation of Peasantry. Rustic Finery.
In the summer of 1918 even the most optimistic Rumanians doubted if the nation would emerge from the war with more than a fraction of its former territory, yet to-day, as a result of the acquisition of Transylvania, Bessarabia and the eastern half of the Banat, the country's population has risen from seven to fourteen millions and its area from 50,000 to more than 100,000 square miles.
Its sponsors, who had foreseen this, provided for it by promising to assign the humanitarian rôle of protectress of the Banat Republic to democratic France. And French agents were on the spot to approve the arrangement. Thus far the story, of which I have given but the merest outline.
The clue to the mystery has at last been found in a secret arrangement between Kuhn and a certain financial group concerning the Banat. About this more will be said later.
In the Banat a merchant was lucky if he could make a contract for delivery of grain at four gulden a measure. Then came a wet summer for sixteen weeks it rained every day; the corn rotted on its stem. In places reputed as a second Canaan, famine set in, and in autumn the price of grain rose to twenty gulden a measure: and even so there was none to be had, for the landowners kept it for seed."
They have nothing corresponding with the European idea of manners: they degrade all ceremony by the epithet Shughl el banat, or "girls' work," and pique themselves upon downrightness of manner, a favourite mask, by the by, for savage cunning to assume. But they are equally free from affectation, shyness, and vulgarity; and, after all, no manners are preferable to bad manners.
Beloved Hungary, whose sons, disdaining the universe, used proudly to boast: "Have we not all that man needs? Banat, which gives us wheat; Tisza, wine; the mountain, gold and salt. Our country is sufficient for her children!" And this country, this fruitful country, was now covered with gibbets and corpses.
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